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 *bers which extorts money by threatened charges of flagitious criminality; but not like these, subjecting the perpetrator to the gallows.

The first in the calumnious line, Blackball, was in some request in the fashionable world, and well known to the Countess: To him she applied in the present case, and instructed him to hunt for anecdotes concerning Hamilton and also Miss Mortimer. The countess learned that Maria had, about three years before, been for some months a parlour boarder at a respectable school in a village in which there was another much less respectable, and which about that time had been the subject of some discussion, on account of an adventure of one of the young ladies and a French-*man: Blackball had heard the particulars from a young teacher, an intimate friend of his, that used to convey to the